Look into my eyes

Over the past few days, I've been trying to follow this eye tutorial I've found:

http://www.jawa9000.com/Technical/eyes/eyes.htm

It's an ok tutorial. Some steps are simple but it requires you to know a bit about Maya beforehand in order to follow the options (especially the textures part and the latter steps) and I think it might be more suited for an older version of Maya.

Anyway, I did manage to successfully make the eyeball move around. Here is a short video I've made demonstrating the tutorial:





I've created a simple shape that I can move around and by using the "Aim" option under the "Constrain" tool, the eyeball will follow.

Sadly, the other steps in the tutorial didn't help much. It goes onto how to make the eyeball blink but I was having a hard time following the steps and didn't think I was going anywhere with it. So I am pleased that I've got the eyeball moving but disappointed in that I couldn't finish the tutorial. It also would had been useful if it gave some more tips on how to model the actual eyeball. The eyeball itself was simple enough but the lids was a bit tricky (hence the reason why they look odd in the video). Truth to be told, my modeling skills aren't that great. Something that has stuck by me since college in 3DS Max.

However, I could use these eyes for my assignment so they're not wasted. In the meantime, I could try to look up more tutorials (specifically on the ones that tells you how to animate the eye's lids) or move onto creating the sword itself.

Plenty of designs

Using the mood board for ideas, I was able to design my own swords. The aim was to keep the design simple enough so it'll be easy to model & animate but also to show its emotions and sympathy clearly. As I was drawing designs, one reoccurring design was the round face which I particularly liked. It was perfect for showing off its feelings as faces are round and it also looked cute. However, I did not like drawing the actual textures and patterns on the sword itself as I thought it looked distracting. The final model will have textures but for now, I shall leave it out.


After drawing many designs, I've picked the one that I've liked the best for my final design:

My animation idea is for the sword to be left alone, abandoned by its owner, showing its emotions as time goes by. The environment and the emotions will change with the seasons. Starting in spring, the sword will be feeling anxious, wondering where its owner is. There will be some greenly like grass and trees surrounding the area. In summer, the sword will be experiencing anger. Fire will appear to help emphasize the emotion. Rain will fall in autumn as the sword feels sad. Finally in a snowy winter, the sword having accepting its fate, falls into a deep slumber.

I hope I will be able to model and animate this by the coming weeks. However I properly should look up pictures of emotions and look up how to model eyes in order to help with my ideas.

A Tale of Maya and Swords

I have some great news.

I've managed to successfully download Maya 2011 onto my computer. Last year I had problems due to the fact that I couldn't access my university email account in order to verify my account. Now that I've linked it to my home email account, I was able to complete the download. I'm very pleased about this as this will help with completing my assignment greatly where I can use my free time at home to work on my model instead of having to rely on the limited time in university.

Speaking of my assignment, it's likely that I will stick to the sword face idea. To help me design my sword, I've gathered some images of swords onto a mood board. It contains a mix of fantasy swords (mainly from video games) and real ones.

Swords with faces have been done before. One example is the sword named Caliburn from Sonic and the Black Knight released for the Wii in 2009. The sword could talk and during cutscenes, you can see his eyes and mouth below the hilt. His gentlemen attitude clashes with Sonic's and the two would often insult each other. Below is a video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djucfJLEr68&feature=player_detailpage#t=165s

For my design, I would probably produce a similar design to Caliburn's but with more focus on the eyes as they can show off some emotions quite easily like anger or sorrow.

Fun with painting

Today's lecture was pretty fun. We were using the Paint Effect tool in Maya. Compared to the actual modeling it's pretty simple and fun. We've played around painting a plane with dry grass and trees as well as changing the colour of the grass. I've turned it blue as it's my favourite colour (it would be worrying however if there were blue grass in real life though).

Here is a screenshot of the results:

I remember using the Paint Effect last year when I've added Fire in my own project. There are plenty of other paint effects to use like weather. I also remember that you can animate them so it would really help my idea a lot if I can find out how to animate these effects.

This is it, the final year!

It's hard to believe that this is my final year in university so soon. It shall be a challenging yet exciting year. I must focus as everything counts to that final grade.

Fortunately, this week was mainly an introduction to our new courses for this semester. The (Advanced) 3D Modeling & Animation for Games course was held in the brand new center for Creative Industries. It was smaller than I've imagined it to be but at least inside is rather shiny and modern. Much like the TARDIS then.

...did I mention it's powered by Solar Energy?

Anyway this assignment is quite similar to last year's...except instead of using a lamp, we can create anything we want which must include environment and emotion. We have to use Maya again. Now I've said I wasn't too keen on it but at least I have some experience on it which is better than starting using a new software from scratch (like Lightwave which I've heard it's even worse...).

At this moment, I have two rough ideas. One is to create a sword (I'm a big fan of them) that is abandoned in the middle of a field. As time goes by, the environment changes. This will allow loads of environmental opportunities but lacks emotion. The alternative would be to model a face which can clearly show emotions but not much of the environment. I suppose I could try to merge the two ideas...

I am hoping that the schedules will be as follows:

• Next 2-3 weeks will be mainly on researching the ideas, gather images and draw rough sketches. Maybe brush up on Maya too
• Next 2 months will be dedicated on creating the project in Maya
• During the last month, everything should hopefully be polished and finished before the deadline on January

But with me juggling this with other assignments, this may change...